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Consider the familiar two-by-two typology that produces known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. We may think all the bases are covered. Now throw in an apparently related term, but from a different field entirely, namely: the “unthought known” of Christopher Bollas, a concept as well-known in psychoanalysis. Mix two genres–Rumsfeld’s fourfold typology and Bollas’s psychoanalytic insight–and you realize the initial distinctions are more complicated.
Known-unknowns are said to be risks that we are aware of, but we don’t fully understand. For example, we may know that there is always a risk of a new competitor entering the market or political arena, but we don’t know how likely this is or what impact it would have on competition or politics. Unknown-knowns are said to be things you’re not aware of but do understand. For example, you know gender bias, but didn’t know it was actually happening in the competitive process of interest to you.
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The unthought known, however, is a kind of knowing that you have not thought about. It is unconscious and often associated with trauma, rendering the unthought known, “unconsciously compelling,” as Bollas puts it. For instance, you know you’re (un)safe without even having to think about it.
How so? Return again to competition and the economic literature on all manner of non-conscious herding behavior, bandwagon effects and market contagion under conditions of deep uncertainty and rapid imitation. Here economic meltdowns, burst financial bubbles and scapegoating give birth to new market rules and wraparound structures, safer for some but not for others.
These phenomena may seem like unknown knowns–we know herding behavior when we see it!–but one must wonder if they are understood psychoanalytically or mimetically as described and formulated.
Unthought knowns, I submit, remain highly policy-relevant, even if the concept doesn’t fit squarely in with known knowns, unknown unknowns, known unknowns, and unknown knowns.
Sources.
–Christopher Bollas (2011). The Christopher Bollas Reader. Routledge: London and New York.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 